Tying The Reed Head To The Staple
Making the aperture or eye plug, this item is inserted into the eye of the head temporarily, it helps to support the head whilst you are tying it on, also stops the petals from being squeezed together, which can crack them, to make the plug, take a section of cane, cut it to width, use the curved outer shiny coating as one of its curved sides and shape/sand the other side so that both curves match exactly as possible.
Never try to close the petals before scraping the head, The lips will close naturally as you scrape, When nearing the end of the scraping/sanding process, the lips should still be slightly open, Then the cane is resting where it wants to, and should work much better than a reed that has to be forced, closed or open, with more than the normal amount of force by the bridle, this technique will come with practice.
Before you tie on the head and with the plug inserted, you can soak the tails of the head in hot or cold water for about five minute, this softens the cane and helps the tails to form beautifully around the staple without the risk of the cane splitting, or you can opt for the trimming down of the tails to a point, which also reduces the stresses there.
With the plug still in place, coat the top of the staple with glue and insert the staple so that it is level with the 3/4" line, see picture top left, Making sure not to get any glue inside the eye of the staple, if you do use a pipe cleaner to remove it before it dries out.
Now you are ready to start binding, place the staple onto the winding machine, start from about a 1/2" from the bottom and gently but firmly move towards the head, when you are nearing the 3/4 line you can increase the binding pressure a little, the two half's of the head should have the same gap on either side and be touching together at the same time.
If the two half's are not even it could be that the staple might be off centre or the two half's are slightly thicker than one another, double check all procedures prior to binding on and it will save you valuable time later.
Carry on binding for another 1/8" above the 3/4" staple line and the two half's of the head should now be fully closed all the way to the tip, now with a wider twist, carry on binding back down towards the bottom of the reed to where you started and tie off, see picture middle right.
To seal the binding you can use either plumbers P.T.F.E tape around the whipping to make the reed air tight, or do it the old way by coating the binding with several coats of shellac, make sure to let them dry to tacky state between coats, see picture bottom right.
Its always best for beginners to completely scrape/make a reed, just in case you build in an irregularities, otherwise you could be building in the same fault to a complete batch, for the more experienced maker you can let the reed settle for a day/week, especially if you have opted for soaking the tails before hand, so that the cane fibres that have been exposed to any water can dry out completely.
